Objective: Students examine photos of indigenous objects, watch a video about plastics, read the company website for mushroom packaging and hypothesize the values these objects embody.
Teaching Plan:
Do Now: Exchange your object with a person in the class. Describe the object you see using the Object Analysis Framework (may want to present the process on the slides). Then, ask your partner why this object is important to them. How does the context they provide shift your understanding of the object?
The teacher then presents photos of various objects from various indigenous cultures, such as the ones included below, concealing names of objects and identifying information. (Teachers may use from this album, or from their own findings: https://photos.app.goo.gl/torLAGc4AkxswkKj6. The fish skin robe (Figure 1) is made by Nanai women and reindeer boots are likely made by the Evenki people, both from the Amur River region in Siberia, kept at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. The rest of the objects in the photo album are from the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. The visitor center contains gifted items from various indigenous tribes near Fairbanks in honor of indigenous civic and business leader Morris Thompson, a Koyukon Athabascan who served as “bridge between cultures.” Students use the Object Analysis Worksheet with a partner (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W4vR7onh6Sn22lIutW94BcTMYPBMlwml6PwWhbUtA0A/edit?usp=sharing) to hypothesize the values these objects embody.
Figure 1: Fish-skin robe from Goldi, Siberia made by Nanai women in the Amur River region. Kept in the Anthropology Collection at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven. Similar to Nivkh fish-robes housed at Minneapolis Institute of Art (for more history and context: https://new.artsmia.org/stories/cleaned-and-repaired-fish-skin-coats-from-siberia-reveal-indigenous-knowledge).
Figure 2: Grass woven bottle, unknown artist, Aleut Corporation, Alaska. Gifted to the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Figure 3: Birch Bark Basket with spruce root tips, Athabascan, Sophie Cleveland, Shungnak, Alaska. Gift of NANA Regional Corporation to Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in Fairbanks, Alaska.
As a group, students share their understanding. The teacher then asks: What does it mean to be “tied to the land”? What do you know of indigenous history in America? After students share their ideas, the teacher will summarize the history of indigenous peoples in America with emphasis on land removal as a deep cultural and spiritual wound. The teacher asks, “How do the way these objects make them similar to or different from the objects you chose?”
Students then watch Mark Miodownik- Plastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_npXGRjW1s. Students discuss the following questions:
- What did you already know?
- What was surprising? Why?
- What values do we embody when we use plastic?
(For teacher reference, full audiobook of Mark Miodownik’s Stuff Matters: Exploring The Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (2014) is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K_UiqcjcaQ. Chapter 3 is the Plastics chapter starting at 3:29:50).
Lastly, students skim the Mushroom Packaging company’s website: https://mushroompackaging.com/ with an emphasis on the “About–Who we are” page as an example of a statement of values. For an exit ticket, students answer the question: Should we change our values around how we make our current day objects, and if so, why and how? If not, why not?
